SPONTANEOUS ACTS OF SCHOLARLY COMBUSTION

Forthcoming Titles

The Event of Art

Forthcoming

The Event of Art presents, in fifty-two modular chapters and over eight hundred pages and images, the works of artist Marc Lafia. The book interweaves essays, notes, photographic archives, and a host of exhibitions wherein ...

Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies 1

Forthcoming

Lamma aims to provide a forum for critically understanding the complex ideas, values, social configurations, histories, and material realities in Libya. Recognizing, and insisting on, the urgent need for such a forum, we give attention ...

An Edition of Miles Hogarde’s A Mirroure of Myserie

Forthcoming

This is the first edition of A Mirroure of Myserie (1557), a poem by the Catholic propagandist Miles Hogarde and probably presented to Queen Mary. Cast as a dream vision, this combative dialogue draws on ...

Li Bo Unkempt

Forthcoming

This is Li Bo. You may also know him as Li Po 李白 (701–62), the great poet of Tang China, master of swoop and soar, wanderer, man of wine, so enamored of the moon that ...

punctum books is an independent open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms. We also take in strays. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds.

Testimonials

The release of art and knowledge from enclosure and hoarding into spirited circulation is punctum books’ great work. It is not just that punctum books refuses to reproduce class inequality by making our work free to the desiring. It is also that it is radically open to collaborative, dynamic, rigorous experiments in genre and thought’s forms.

punctum books is the antidote to the Amazonification of publishing that many have been waiting for. But like the actual Amazon forest — and unlike Amazon.com — punctum books is essential for the health of our literary ecosystem. It is the lungs of a certain dispersed, but resonant, creative milieu. And what it lacks in scale, it more than makes up for in energy, enthusiasm, ingenuity, vision, commitment, and — well — joy!

punctum books is conceptually the bravest and aesthetically the most inspiring publisher in the humanities I have encountered to date. And when I refer to aesthetics in this context I do not mean “illustration” of the text but punctum books’ insistence on form as an element of transformation — or simply formation — of semantics rather than its ornamental extension. The open access to their publications is a reflection of the spirit of generosity which offers more than just free books. Generosity is what makes their output a constant risk in experimentation that they take together with their authors. So, it is thanks to their generosity that their catalog seems like an incessant intellectual festival one always desires to return to.